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Present at the Counterculture’s Creation

Testifying at the Chicago Seven trial in 1970, Ed Sanders identified himself to Judge Julius Hoffman as a “poet, songwriter, leader of a rock-and-roll band, publisher, editor, recording artist, peace-creep.” He lived in the East Village, which, as he writes in his great-souled memoir of the 1960s, was a “Do-It-Now zone.” The book portrays him doing many things. Which was the most interesting?

Was it singing with the Fugs, a scabrous, joyous, poetic-satiric, sort-of rock band whose second album — including the songs “Kill for Peace” and “Group Grope” — actually made the Cashbox charts in mid-1966? Was it his poetry, influenced by Charles Olson and Sappho?

Was it his passionate work as a mimeograph publisher and free-speech activist: 13 issues of a hand-printed, hand-stapled, gleefully profane literary magazine published between 1962 and 1965, including the work of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Norman Mailer, which gained national renown despite its unprintable title? Was it his advocacy to change marijuana laws, his proprietorship of the Peace Eye bookstore (first on East 10th Street, then on Avenue A), his peaceful and creative methods of political protest, his formal studies in classics and Egyptology, his dodging of F.B.I. and police surveillance?

Or was it his unfulfilled career as an underground filmmaker? His major work, influenced by the directorial style of Jonas Mekas and Ron Rice, was “Amphetamine Head: A Study of Power in America.” The mise-en-scène was a crowd of artists in an empty apartment, consuming speed, then drawing on themselves and the walls. It amounted to 10,000 feet of jabber-filled footage, all seized in a police raid in 1965.

Mr. Sanders, now 72 and living in Woodstock, N.Y., has described his 1960s in various ways over the years. His long bibliography includes a book of fictionalized stories (“Tales of Beatnik Glory”) and epic-historical verse according to the precepts of a technique he calls “Investigative Poetry.” (He published a manifesto about that too.) But “Fug You,” a book of more straightforward storytelling and documentation, may be the master source.

Photo

Ed SandersCredit
Beth Bliss

As a poet Mr. Sanders operates on joy, velocity, humor and catharsis, forcibly mushing bodies of knowledge together; he describes his literary persona in the ’60s as an “anarcho-Egypto-Bacchic.” As a prose writer he’s pretty much the same, with extra mugging and contextualizing. To some extent this is an old-school show-business gossip memoir that doesn’t want to waste your time, even as it discusses Egyptian glyphs and the C.I.A. (It has a funny tonal parallel, to, say Walter Winchell’s memoir, “Exclusive.”) Mr. Sanders is fond of subtitling each rat-a-tat vignette; deploys Mad magazine-style triple exclamation marks; and reprints many of his own words, from personal letters, screeds, news releases, and talk-show colloquy, including his appearance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” alongside Jack Kerouac.

When you read about Mr. Sanders’s journey through the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — which led to the arrest and trial of the Chicago Seven — you might marvel at a passage in which he eats some powerful hash-oiled honey. “I looked up through the tear-gas sonata of Lincoln Park,” he writes, “and the Universe from the edge of the Lake up across the wide Midwest sky was made up of pulsing, writhing mountains and vistas of spinach.” These same words, and many others in the same chapter, were arranged almost exactly as poetry in his book “1968: A History in Verse,” published in 1997.

But that’s all right. Mr. Sanders is a creative collector and recycler. Elsewhere in this book he describes a moment of penury in 1964 when he assembled a catalog of literary ephemera, including two packets of the pubic hair from famous poets — O’Hara, LeRoi Jones, Edwin Denby, Ted Berrigan and others — harvested by Ginsberg and donated to Mr. Sanders as a favor. The items “sold briskly,” he notes.

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In February 1967 Mr. Sanders appeared on the cover of Life magazine as a leader of “the Other Culture,” but he was perhaps both a little too scholarly and a little too normal to become a true sixties martyr-symbol. He filmed friends having sex in the name of underground cinema and progressive freakery, but he never mentions joining in. He was religious about marijuana, but heroin and amphetamines spooked him — particularly toward the end of the ’60s, as the East Village and the country grew more death haunted. (In the many big-picture asides about Vietnam, Cuba and American domestic politics he writes well about sinister vibes, “the skree of weirdness, calamity and secret police.” Still, this is not a paranoid or rancorous book.)

By the force of his enthusiasm he argues as well as anyone for the greatness of certain poets, particularly Olson (whom he calls “the O”) and Ginsberg; he also pays powerful respect to various social activists — Dorothy Day, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abbie Hoffman.

In the book’s introduction Mr. Sanders does admit to “remorse and sometimes even shame” about things he did during the 1960s — errors, he says, that can’t be blamed on “vodka, pot, paraquat, psilocybin universe-wandering, anarcho-socialism, or excessive Protestant mean streak.” And he admits to a few minor moral failings, which include getting used to riding in limousines at the brief height of the Fugs’ fame. But the limousine period didn’t last long, and the book doesn’t seem sanitized to make him look virtuous.

He got through the decade without irreparable damage to his critical faculties, his productivity or his marriage. (He has been married to the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders since 1961; how I would love to read her side of this story.) Evidently he remains a peace-creep; he doesn’t like anyone mistreated or endangered. His interest in chaos always had a firm limit, for himself and for others. Probably that’s why he’s alive, and why we can read this funny, instructive, nourishing book.

FUG YOU

An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the ____ You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side

By Ed Sanders

Illustrated. 424 pages. Da Capo Press. $26.99.

A version of this review appears in print on January 12, 2012, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Present at the Counterculture’s Creation. Today's Paper|Subscribe